Hi everyone,
just tried to bake a couple of assets with a total polycount of 44k tris.
Now the bake does already take several hours to complete on a decent 3.90 GHz six core AMD processor with 8 gb of ram. I’m just wondering if I’m actually doing something wrong here since it was never near that slow in Unity 4.
Please have a look at the attached image and tell me if I can improve the settings to make it faster without sacrificing lots of quality.
Hi! Indirect resolution of 10 sounds way too high. 1 texel per unit should be sufficient for most scenes.
Hey, thanks for your fast reply, I really appreaciate it 
I followed your advice by turning the indirect resolution down to 1. Sadly it still took 28 minutes, compared to Beast bake in Unity 4 with ~2 min 30 sec though I don’t see much difference in quality.
Gonna turn Final Gather down to the default 1024 rays and see how that’ll impact on the time/quality ratio. Is there anything I can do to get kinda similar baking times that Beast had? I understand Enlighten is a different (and maybe more powerful) system but for production these baking times just seem a bit too high for similar results that the old system could produce.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated
It is not possible to compare times 1:1 as Enlighten is doing more work than Beast is, but for complex scenes with the same texel density, you should get the same bake times as with Beast if resolution is set correctly. Current Final Gather performance is not great so if you enable FG, it will take longer than what you are used to. We expect Final Gather will become a lot faster in the coming months.
Does it mean if we leave FG off we wont get any indirect lighting ? if the answer is no, then so what does the FG actually do?
That’s great to hear, final gather seems to really do increase bake times by quite a lot.
I can confirm the similarity in baking time between Beast and Enlighten to some degree, at least in small scenes. But bigger scenes (~ 250k polys, ) still seem to bake a good bit slower for some reason, even with final gather turned off.
Gonna try to log baking times for my case and e.g. file a bug report if I feel the differences are extreme.
You will still get indirect lighting, but the quality will not be as good.
I had a similar issue with my bake times being astronomical, but once I reduced my indirect resolution it became usable again…great tip
It would be nice if there were presets for Draft(Fast) and Final(Slow) so that the difference in variables can be analyzed by the user. That would probably be more effective at explaining things than trying to put tooltip descriptions on everything and describing what makes things fast/slow.
It highly depends on your scene, for small room 40/2 is quite ok and will finish in minutes, yet if you have huge outdoors environment it will take several+ hours.
We could probably add more Parameter presents, but the problem is explaining the relative size of the scene in that range from small interiors to huge outdoors.
You’re right, and I understand that scene complexity is the biggest factor but I think you’re missing the point.
What the general population is looking for is “I want this to not take 2 hours, what knobs do I turn down and how far?” and it seems like a preset for a Draft/Final style of baking would give them that answer and show them what (at a high level) some general ‘fast’ settings are versus some general ‘better quality’ settings.
For example in Mental Ray these sorts of preset settings are a great way for a beginner to see which settings they need to turn down to get faster results and they can go from there and read more into the descriptions and stuff to understand how they should adjust which settings to get the result they want relative to their specific scene.
I agree with Lane on this.
Some sort of indicator as to how long the settings you have could take…
I would love to bake just a portion of the scene to check the quality. For me waiting 8 hours for a bake that does not look right is just not an effective use of my time
We realize that it’s not optimal currently, that’s why we are working on Ray Tracing, which hopefully will be ultimate solution for this as it will allow you way faster iteration time:
https://youtu.be/qcLBFVFUsI8?t=38m54s
It will also start by baking that you are currently viewing, so it’s helpful when you have big scene and want to play around with small part of it.
This sounds like the best solution to me.
I just hope there is some sort of interim solution between now and then to enable a preview of sorts.
Thanks!
